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Virtual reality for animals reveals secrets of working brain

Animals thinking inside a virtual world can help us understand what can go wrong in the brain

Video: Watch a mouse move up and down a virtual corridor

By Sujata Gupta

IT’S decision time. The mouse has scurried down the 3-metre-long corridor, and now faces a T-junction. It knows from experience that a reward of refreshing water lies at the end of one path. The other route leads to nothing. The mouse makes its choice and hurries off to the left.

Or so it thinks. In reality, the rodent is running on the spot, navigating a computer-generated world projected onto the inside of a spherical surface that fills its field of view. It is just one of …